Introduction#
For the second year, Google decided to hold a Google Developer Day in Milan. It was my first time at a Google event and I found it really great.
I arrived at the hotel set up for the event (Nhow Hotel, Via Tortona 35 in Milan) at 9 o’clock in the morning, and there was a huge number of people waiting to get into the hall. So I started with a little queue (about 15 minutes waiting to solve my registration) and hoping to enter. In fact I didn’t make the registration for the event but I was there to substitute a colleague: no one asked me any kind of document that could prove that I was who I said I was! :) So really cool… for a day I wasn’t me!! :)
Anyway… after registration where I chose my session (I got all sessions I decided to see… not bad ;)) I started walking around the hall, where there was a coffee break for a little breakfast, and looking for the programmers present at the event. As I imagined I met some people I knew! (the IT is a little world!! :P)
At 10 o’clock everyone started moving into the “light blue room” to listen to a little introduction from the Italian Marketing Manager (I can’t remember the name but… was a woman!) and something about Google technologies listening to Brian Fitzpatrick, a Google software engineer. No news in this presentation: the message sent to all developers was “Google is the best!” ;)
App Engine (Kevin Gibbs)#
Introduction to Google App Engine technology. Basically you can write your application (in different languages) and “deploy” it on Google systems. You have only some limitations in your “free account” but Google can assure you that all applications are completely scalable: if you need more resources (application on cluster) Google gives them to you. What you need to do, is just to write your code. You also have some APIs that help you to make some operations, for example image manipulation, and using this API you have an operation that, if it needs more CPU time, for example, it could have it!
Not bad!! Naturally the best thing is the possibility to test this technology for free!
I tried to ask something about cluster management (if we can for example manage the HTTP session synchronization) and the answer wasn’t a “NO” but something that was dancing around “NO”! :)
Google Data API (Jochen Hartmann)#
This was a quiet session. A panorama about Google Data APIs, written for many different languages, that you can use to make your application communicate with the Google World! Picasa to get photos, Google Maps, YouTube and all other things.
I had no idea how I could use all these things… but now I know what I can do and how! :P
Geo (Nicola Ferioli)#
Wow an Italian Talk!! I was excited just before the talk because, maybe (or surely) for the presence of an Italian speaker, during the presentation there were many questions (with many interruptions of the talk) and at the end of the talk I didn’t have time to speak with Nicola about geo. I hope I’ll have time to talk with him in the future.
All of us have tried to use Google Earth and surely Google Maps; here the presentation was about the integration of these tools inside other web applications. What you can do is really impressive. You can simply insert a map in your page and then add to this “image” a second layer with some markers to show points of interest on your map. Naturally the generated map is the same you can use on the Google website, so you can navigate it and change details and zoom levels.
If you “don’t like” (or better you don’t need) the Google Map, you can also change the “skin” you get from Google with your own pictures. So what you get from Google is only the engine to navigate your image and add markers over it.
You could do the same things using the newest Earth plugin: you can insert in your web page an “image” from Earth and navigate it!
Intro to Android#
Android was the most impressive talk I saw at GDD. The real “presentation” of the operating system was just about the main features offered by Android; what caught my attention was the “demo application” that the speaker (unfortunately I can’t remember the name) built using Eclipse and the Android plugin. In 30 minutes, showing also all the features offered by the Eclipse Android plugin, he created a simple Java application that can read contacts from the phone contacts list and show results to the user.
For a Java programmer, it’s really simple to create a new application for the phone and, in my opinion, this will be the cool feature to capture the market and move many users to this new phone (both Symbian users and iPhone users ;)).
Yesterday (22 Oct 2008) the first Google Phone (with HTC hardware) was released in the US… We just have to wait to buy the phone also here in Europe! :)
It was a really cool event and I have to thank my colleague Luca for the opportunity! ;)